- Wed Mar 25, 2026 5:16 pm
#108150
Really excellent, insightful piece by Tom Watson.
I have been reading Liam Byrne’s new book on populism, and I want to come back to it properly in a later piece. But one chapter stopped me in my tracks, and I cannot move on without writing about it.
The chapter on money is the most important thing I have read about British politics this year. Byrne traces the financial architecture behind the populist right with a granularity that most journalists have not attempted and most politicians have been too cautious to name. A small network of British mega-donors, operating through a media and political complex that has been quietly assembled over the past decade, poured £153 million into the machinery of the populist right. Dark money. Crypto wallets. Kremlin-linked financial institutions. All of it flowing toward a political project that presents itself as the authentic voice of the British people.
This matters not as historical curiosity but as present emergency. Reform UK is not a grassroots movement. It is a funded operation. And until we get serious about the money behind it, we will keep losing to it on the terms it has set.
But here is the part that keeps me awake at night. Byrne’s new research maps Reform’s coalition into five distinct tribes. Roughly 40 per cent of Farage’s vote, the groups he calls the Melancholy Middle and the Civic Pragmatists, are not hardliners at all. They are anxious, disappointed, essentially persuadable voters who worry about the NHS, about whether their community is getting its fair share, and about whether any government is actually in control of anything. They voted Reform because nothing else felt credible. Byrne’s data shows they are genuinely reachable by Labour, if Labour can demonstrate seriousness and competence on the things they care about most.
Which brings me to Shabana Mahmood’s proposed reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain, the legal status that gives migrants who have lived here for a qualifying period the same right to settle and access public services as British citizens. Under the existing rules, that qualifying period is five years. The previous Conservative government, desperate to fill a collapsing social care sector after Brexit closed off the supply of European workers, recruited hundreds of thousands of care workers from abroad on a new visa route. That recruitment surge, which began in earnest in 2021 and continued at scale through 2022 and 2023, has become known as the “Boris wave.” Those workers were told that after five years they would be eligible to apply for ILR. Those five-year clocks are now beginning to run out.
I want to say something that some of my old colleagues in the parliamentary Labour Party will not like. The critics of Mahmood’s proposals owe the public an honest answer to a simple question: what is their alternative?
Because here is what the alternative actually means. By 2028, the Home Office projects 450,000 people will cross that qualifying threshold in a single year. Once they have ILR, they have full access to the same welfare entitlements as existing British citizens. The government’s own figures suggest that 196,000 care workers and their dependants, many of them low-paid, many without a clear route back into the labour market once their sponsorship ends, will cost the state nearly £10 billion in benefits.
Those care workers were recruited by Boris Johnson to plug a gap in our social care sector. Many of them answered that call in good faith, uprooted their families and built lives here. I have real sympathy for their individual situations, and I understand why MPs in constituencies with large affected communities feel a personal obligation to stand up for them. That is honourable.
But the political logic of simply opposing Mahmood’s changes without offering a credible alternative is not honourable. It is evasive. You cannot simultaneously tell the public you take immigration control seriously and then fight to preserve a settlement pathway that the Home Office calculates will trigger a £10 billion benefits bill at a moment when every spending commitment is being fought over tooth and nail.
Mahmood is right that the “Boris wave” was a disgrace. The visa route was poorly designed, badly implemented and in some cases actively abused. An excoriating report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration published in 2024, said so. The former government opened the taps and then walked away. Labour is left to manage the consequences.
The retrospective element of government proposals is genuinely difficult. I understand the fairness argument. People made life decisions on the basis of rules that now may change beneath them. That is a legitimate concern, and I hope the transitional arrangements the government is considering are designed with some generosity. But the principle of reform is right, and the critics need to grapple with the fiscal and political reality rather than simply invoking the language of broken promises.
Angela Rayner, to whom I have enormous personal affection and respect, has called the retrospective element of these proposals “un-British.” She invoked fair play, goalposts and breach of trust. It is a characteristically vivid intervention by my friend. But I want to gently push back, because the argument has a flaw at its centre.
What is the British tradition she is invoking? Is it not also a British tradition to manage the consequences of decisions responsibly, to balance individual expectations against collective obligations, and to be honest with the public when a previous government made promises the country cannot now keep at the scale originally intended? Boris Johnson opened those taps. Angela bears no responsibility for that. But the question of what to do now is unavoidable. “Un-British” is a powerful phrase. It is also, on this occasion, a way of closing down a conversation that the Labour Party urgently needs to have.
There is one more thing worth saying about the lazy phrase that keeps circulating among the critics: that Labour risks trying to “out-Reform Reform” on immigration. It is worth pausing to ask what Reform’s actual policy on ILR is. It is not a longer qualifying period. It is not contribution-based earned settlement. It is the complete abolition of ILR as a status, including retrospectively stripping it from people who already hold it, and replacing permanent residence with renewable five-year visas subject to salary thresholds most care workers could never meet. Mahmood’s reforms and Reform’s position are not points on the same continuum. They are entirely different propositions. To invoke “you can’t out-Reform Reform” in relation to a policy of earned settlement after ten years is not a serious political argument. It is a thought-stopping phrase that lets the speaker feel righteous while avoiding the hard question of what they would actually do instead.
I have been searching for a Labour MP willing to say that phrase on the record. The nearest I can find is Andy McDonald, MP for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East and veteran of Thompsons Solicitors. His legal specialism before entering Parliament was submarines, which is to say his career was spent in the deepest and most pressurised waters known to maritime law. I love that detail. Because what Andy has done here is essentially what submarines do: he has risen briefly to the surface, launched his torpedo, and immediately dived again. In submarine terms, this is known as a periscope depth manoeuvre: just enough visibility to fire, not enough to be seen.
Andy’s warning that Labour cannot defeat Reform by imitating its agenda is not wrong as a general proposition. But applied to a ten-year contribution-based qualifying period for settlement, it is the kind of remark that sounds devastating in a corridor and dissolves on contact with the actual policy. Andy knows a breach of contract when he sees one. He also knows, better than most, that some vessels are built to operate under pressure. On this occasion, I would gently suggest he answer the question his colleagues will not: if not this, then what?
Andy might also want to sit with his own numbers. He won Middlesbrough and Thornaby East in 2024 with 16,238 votes and a majority of 9,192. Reform polled 7,046 in second place, on a turnout of just 46 per cent, in a Labour landslide year when the Conservatives were in freefall. The seat ranks 53rd in the country for Leave vote share. On current polling, Electoral Calculus predicts it as a Reform gain at the next election.
I say that with genuine warmth and without any pleasure. Andy is a fine parliamentarian and a good man. But his best chance of still being in this place after the next election lies not in blocking earned settlement, but in a Labour government that is trusted to make hard decisions and seen to deliver on them. The four in ten Reform voters who are genuinely persuadable will not be won back by a party that looks conflicted and fires torpedoes at its own Home Secretary. They will be won back by one that looks serious, stays surfaced, and holds its nerve.
Here is what Byrne’s book makes clear, and what too many on the Labour left refuse to accept. The populist threat is real, it is funded, and it feeds on exactly this kind of perceived inconsistency. When voters in the seats where Reform runs second, and there are more than 80 of them, see a Labour government promising immigration control while a significant block of its own MPs fights to preserve the pipeline to settlement for low-paid workers who arrived during a Conservative immigration surge, they do not conclude that Labour has a principled position on fairness. They conclude that Labour is talking out of both sides of its mouth.
I know more than most how hard it is to hold together a coalition that spans communities with very different interests and very different relationships to immigration. I am not asking anyone to be cruel. I am asking them to be honest.
Byrne’s book argues that the antidote to populism is not another comms grid but genuine courage. On the evidence of the ILR rebellion, that courage is still in short supply
The dark money funding the populist right is a scandal that deserves far more scrutiny than it gets. But we will not be able to make that argument land if we cannot first demonstrate that we understand why people are angry, and that we are prepared to make difficult decisions in response. Mahmood is doing that. Andy McDonald, on this occasion, is not.
Liam Byrne’s book, Why Populists are Winning: And How to Beat Them is published March 26th by Apollo.
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
- By Youngian